I'm considering swapping my E4500(dual 2.20 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 2M Cache) for Q9***(quad >2.5 GHz GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 3M Cache). Those parts go for ~$150 used. Would that make sense as an upgrade at this time or would there be more clever routes to take?

AFAIK in the USA a current i5 2400 (quad core 3.1GHz) starts from about 162 USD (the unlocked - up to 5GHz - 2500K from 199 USD), a Core i3 2100 (dual core 3.1GHz) from about 106 USD, an AMD Phenom II X4 840 (quad core 3.2GHz) from about 80 USD: so, read some reviews and then try to do your math (with some more relevant swedish prices, I mean).

I guess Q9300 & Q9400 make most reasonable upgrades for a system like yours. Q9450 and higher models are still v powerful but tend to be expensive to buy. Q6600 are too power hungry to consider these days, but if you don't mind that and are on a budget then go get one, run it at 9 x 333 and you should be fine for some time. I'm speaking in relation to 2nd hand 775 CPUs found in Poland's main auction service. While dual core 775 CPUs are generally v cheap (except for E8400 and higher clocked duals), quads are still a little on the expensive side, with Q9xxx being sweet spots. But to get most of these, your mobo should allow at least 400 FSB to net you 3 or 3.2 GHz, respectively.

I recently upgraded to 1155 from 775, but I had a Xeon 3350 (Q9450), a good mobo and a nice set of DDR to sell. All in all I got my new gear at almost no extra expense. Mind you, I hunted for 2nd hand 1155 parts as well. Were I to buy them at shop prices the whole deal wouldn't be so sweet. One more thing to note - when I compared my Q9450 (running at 3.2 GHz) to newer CPUs I arrived at the conclusion that it's roughly equivalent to I3 2100.

For a reasonable 1155 system you could get a P67 board (say, Asrock Pro3) and either I3 2100 (no OC at all for ya) or I5 2300/2400, each of them easily reaching +500 MHz on any board. DDR3 are dime a dozen these days - your 2nd hand DDR2 will probably sell for more.

I guess it makes more sense to upgrade the MB as well then. I'll have some serious reading ahead of me to make sense of the current offerings. Anyone wanna chime in on the current sweet-spot in performance-to-dollars in the mean time? I'm not averse to OC-ing if thermals are resonable.

What people are missing on the performance/dollar front is that there are really cheap Sandy Bridge dual-cores now, branded Pentium and Celeron. It wouldn't be a big upgrade for you as far as performance is concerned but they're cheap even when you consider the cost of a mobo (as long as you pick a cheap model), perform decently and burn very little power. In that respect (ease of cooling), it would be a serious upgrade.

But if you want more performance on a single board, an overclocked 2500K could deliver good value as well in spite of its high price. It would require some work however.

People are missing the value of the cheapest AMD quad-cores for strictly multithreaded workloads I think. AMD octo-cores are also much cheaper than Intels. It'll be interesting to see how the upcoming Bulldozers are priced. But Intel's current CPUs are so efficient that I don't think AMD is really in the running compared to seriously overclocked Intels.

Seems like some old anti-Celeron bias crept in to my mind, the G530 certainly seems like the better value/transition part. On a different topic I just found the Sandy Bridge buyers guide at Anandtech. Funny how the different CPUs and chipsets features are disappearing and reappearing between tiers . Gotta keep on reading...

Unless I'm missing a limitation of the Celerons, the new G530 would be the best value actually.

IMO it depends from the retailer of choice, as someone have nearly identical prices for the G620 Pentiums. But generally speaking, does it really sound right to buy one of these and swapping it in a year or so for something like an i5-2500K? Maybe just if you plan buying this latter as a used part?

At anyway, from an oc'ing and silence perspective, the mobo shouldn't be so cheap: personally I advise for the ASUS P8P67M-Pro (or something similarly priced from MSI).

Eventually, with reference to the AMD platform, it would look like to me that most of the good AM3+ boards (I would avoid the 970) are right now a bit expensive (but not some Gigabytes, which I generally dislike for their BIOS), and so they are the AMD X6 CPUs compared with the i5s. I hope that Bulldozer may change my thought.

But generally speaking, does it really sound right to buy one of these and swapping it in a year or so for something like an i5-2500K?

No, I wouldn't do it myself.These CPUs are too good to throw away. Better buy a cheap board that can't overclock and repurpose or sell the board alongside the CPU when you want to upgrade. The combined cost would be in the same range as a board which comes with an embedded CPU so you might as well treat it as such.

Do you fold or do any GPGPU computing? Do you use any 'nix flavour? Do you use your peecee as an high-performance/high-end HTPC? If you may answer "no" to those questions, then the Z68 would seem the most cost effective candidate, even some high-end board like the ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z (I'm currently testing one of these, and I'm very satisfied by it). IMVHO.

While, if you go for a Celeron/Pentium (or any low end locked SB CPUs), a super-charged H61 (like several ASUS) should be preferable over the H67 (or Z68).

Getting the Q9400 for $150 is certainly the least cost way for a decent improvement in performance...at least for multi-threaded apps. Anandtech Bench comparison to the E4500. ~2x improvement by adding two cores

Your video app might be limited by the 4GB of RAM (I can't speak to the audio application). Try running task manager in the background and see.

The 9800 in all it's forms was a pig in idle/2D power use. Somewhere around 30-40W DC. Maybe they lowered this in the green version proportially to the lowered clock rate. <shrugs> A current gen card idles ~10W. You could spend $50-75 for a passive HD 6570 for lower power/better video quality. This would help offset the added CPU thermal load.

Otherwise, you could build an i5 based system. An i5-2400 certainly improves upon the Q9400. Don't know if you want to OC an audio recording system due to added thermal/noise concerns. If you don't OC, then get an H67 board. The HD2000 gpu should be good enough for you and you get access to Quick Sync. You can always add a passive GPU for improved 2D processing later if needed.

For this kind of thing I'd either try to lay my hands on a s/h processor at a reasonable price to update the pc or simply "junk" (or offload sell on the pc or partial rebuild and sell on etc etc) the lot.

Prices are horribly cheap right now esp memory you can pretty much get a decent CPU, budget board and 4Gb DDR 3 memory for £100 odd which will be likely twice as fast as the OP's older CPU if not more. Much as I like some of the older stuff and I do keep some stocks of ram, processors etc etc that I've pulled from older problem pc's, more often than not it's not worth messing about upgrading rather just rip it out and start over.

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